Handmade Shoes and Conservatories– Part 2
Our friend, Jae Brown, has a very interesting collection of shoes. In fact, so interesting and unusual, it is going to be on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh beginning in April 2011.
In the early 1990’s, Jae was in Crete (Greece) during one of her many visits and came upon a small shop in the town of Heraklion. It was the retail outlet of the master shoemaker and extraordinary artist Vasilis Stamatakis. Fascinated by one of the items she saw in the window, she inquired of the owner and over the next five years a friendship between Vasilis and Jae blossomed.
Vasilis was born to a farming family living near Heraklion in 1916. As a boy, he hated farming and at an early age, became fascinated with boot making. He trained under master bootmakers in Crete and later in Athens, an unheard of distance away at the time and learned to cater to the extravagant tastes of extremely wealthy clients.
He learned the trade secrets that included how to make the fabulous wedding and trousseau pumps, exquisite little shoes for babies, and even specially footwear to wear in the coffin for the high society of the time. Little by little, he had worked his way up to full-fledged Master Shoemaker from shop assistant.
The amazing thing about his art work is the absolutely bizarre circumstances under which he worked. Once in business for himself, each painstakingly handmade pair of his exquisite shoes, produced decade after decade, were made completely in secret and never offered for sale. For although he had a retail shoe shop and an extremely well equipped workshop, his high-style handmade pieces were never even displayed but were done entirely for his own pleasure.
His downtown Heraklion shop “The Elite Shoe Shop” displayed and sold only the rigidly-conservative humdrum footwear mass produced by the wholesale shoe manufacturers in Athens. The reason for this is that Vasilis early on realized that the ultra-conservative matrons who were his customers wanted only the inoffensive ordinary brown and black low-heeled pumps or sandals. In 1941 when he opened his shop, Crete was incredibly conservative and there was no market for the stunning pieces of art he would handcraft.
So over the course of a year and a half, Jae purchased thirty five pairs of shoes from his collection (then in storage) all of which he had made by hand in his Heraklion workshop. The work was done between the years 1941 and 1969 when Vasilis retired and handed the shop over to his daughter.
I was first introduced to Jae’s extraordinary collection during a visit to the Riverstone property in Foxburg Pennsylvania. They had just completed a photo shoot using local friends as models and set them against the great backdrop of the Foxburg estate and mansion. The photographer, Dennis Keys also took some photos at his farm.
You can see these extraordinary works at his website.
Jae herself has set up a website devoted to the life and art of Vasilis Stamatakis. Visit the site and learn about ‘REMBETIKA’ – THE MUSIC THAT INSPIRED VASILIS’ FABULOUS DESIGNS
Might be worth a trip to Pittsburgh too.
Alan
Handmade Shoes and Conservatories– Part 1
I was flying home from a trip last week and picked up the in flight magazine to see an interesting article titled “Handmade in America”. The article was about the resurgence of interest in “old-school” craftsmanship – handmade artisan products which are becoming very “new-school”. Some would include our conservatories in that group.
With the tagline “Out with the new and in with the old, trendsetting artisans look to the past to make goods that stand the test of time”, the article profiles eight individuals and their company’s that have built thriving businesses making extremely high quality products by hand – the “old fashioned” way.
Tadd Meyers, a Dallas photographer, crisscrossed the country and shot more than 10,000 images of these artisans and their work. In the article are some of his photographs of shoemakers, a company that makes handmade baseball gloves, a company that makes pewter artifacts, a custom guitar maker and a company that makes wooden jigsaw puzzles and rocking horses.
The article highlights a few of them including Danner Footwear in Portland Oregon. It’s not uncommon for Danner’s customers to boast they have been wearing their same Danner Footwear for twenty years. The sole aim of the company since its founding in 1932, is to make their boots last just that long. Each piece of leather is individually tested and all stitching is done by hand.
As is Trail Town Boots in Saint Jo Texas. Carl Chappell, owner, says that before he even starts a pair of his custom made boots, he uses a tape measure to size the customers feet and checks how much “meat” is on them so he knows how firm the boots need to be. Each pair of boots takes him about forty hours to craft.
The article interested me because I am a long time proponent of back-to-the-past craftsmanship however, my take has always been to make the utmost use of available technology. I suspect that back in 1932, when Danner Footwear was founded, the owners would have jumped on any opportunities presented by technology to make their boots the very best at that time – AND make their business the most competitive around.
They would have never turned their backs on technology which could give them a competitive advantage, so why should we do that today. Do companies really have that kind of luxury to charge customers for the cost of not employing technology just for the sake of being able to say the product is “hand made” and thereby unique? Being in the manufacturing business, I can assure anyone that anything made “by hand” is not better just because it is hand made. Technology has the potential not just to make things more efficiently, but to make them at a much higher level of quality as well.
So why is it that handcrafting has become so retro-popular? Do people believe that handmade stuff is really better than items made using technology? Is it because of the stigma that mass production has? Does it have something to do with our sense of ourselves as unique individuals? We want something ultra unique to express our inner uniqueness? Or maybe we don’t feel unique enough inside and want something to compensate? I think we all want desperately to be unique individuals ourselves.
I think the real trick is to find a way to produce very individually distinct products, products that are highly customized to a customers unique wishes, yet to produce them in the most efficient technologically-advanced way possible. That is what we try to do at Tanglewood Conservatories. It requires a very high level of technology because it is the antithesis of mass-production. Each job that Tanglewood Conservatories designs and produces is unique, with unique details and sometimes even unique whole building systems that we have to invent as we go.
It is technology that allows us to do this and it is this process that is one of the most exciting parts of the conservatory business for me.
So please do not count me in the ranks for the back-to-the-past purists. I’m looking forward to the future and all the great stuff we can do with it.
Next time, I’ll show everyone some REALLY cool hand made shoes.
Alan